Open Thread for Thursday, September 29, 2016

Once again, these polls were taken before the debate. Today, we should start getting post debate polls. But it is interesting that the swing back to Hillary had already begun before the debate when we were all panicking. You see, polling is a delayed science. Most polling takes place over three to four days. Then it takes another day or so to compile and publish the results. So polls are really reflecting what happened a week before they were released.

PRESIDENT
NATIONAL——Reuters/Ipsos——CLINTON 44, Trump 38
MICHIGAN——FOX 2 Detroit/Mitchell——CLINTON 46, Trump 41
WASHINGTON——Emerson——CLINTON 44, Trump 38
NORTH CAROLINA——Meredith College——CLINTON 38, Trump 35
OHIO——TargetSmart——CLINTON 40, Trump 37

“The millennial vote isn’t Hillary vs Trump. It’s Hillary vs Gary Johnson vs sitting on the couch on Election Day.” https://t.co/iNjMAKG7yS

— McKay Coppins (@mckaycoppins) September 28, 2016

Josh Marshall says Hillary ruled the debate:

There was no knock out blow here. I don’t know that it will move the polls dramatically. But Trump was scattered, swaggering and stumbling. He lied a lot and repeatedly refused to answer big questions in a way that was fairly obvious and transparent. If you hadn’t heard him refuse to release his taxes before, how do you think it came off here? I think most people who had doubts about him won’t have those doubts assuaged. People inclined not to like him likely found him bullying and rude – and not even successful at it at that. I’m not sure this is any game changer. It simply confirms what a lot of people already know: Trump is not suited to be President. Clinton is competent, prepared and in this exchange buoyant and dynamic.

If I know anything about Trump he’ll feel wounded by this encounter, low-stamina Hillary, almost a foot shorter than him, a weak women … well, she controlled him and owned the floor. Like we saw with Pastor Timmons and so many others who have hurt him, he’ll lash out.

I think the night went badly for Trump. We’ll have several days again going over his list of lies. And the pressure on him will go up for the second debate.

And he Trumped lashed yesterday and Tuesday, as predicted. Marshall says we need to give Hillary her due: “[I]t’s a good moment for all of those who constantly complain about Hillary being a terrible candidate, making this or that mistake, screwing this or that up, her performance last night was pitch perfect. Yes, he did badly. But she brought it at least as much as he blew it.”

"This was not a bad performance. This is a bad man.” -Adam Gopnik on the debate: https://t.co/fZenAzGAy1

— Arianna Huffington (@ariannahuff) September 28, 2016

Jonathan Chait: “If you’re a Republican who has been clinging to the wan hope that Donald Trump might somehow, in his eighth decade on Earth, develop into a plausibly competent president of the United States, the first debate should have been your moment to abandon ship. Trump displayed the factual command of a small child, the emotional stability of a hormonal teen, and the stamina of an old man, staggering and losing the thread as the 90 minutes wore on.”

“Instead, Republicans — without a single exception I have seen — have responded very differently. They have treated their candidate’s glaring unsuitability for high office as, at worst, a handful of discrete errors that in no way reflect on his character, and at best, the dastardly unfairness of the liberal media.”

More Chait, on how Trump’s response made the Machado story work:

“You can easily see why Clinton’s campaign decided this was the perfect anecdote to display his grotesque personal qualities. It contains several elements all at once. There is Trump’s lecherous habit of creeping around beauty contestants, which is its own deep vein of gross behavior. There is the cruel reduction of women to their appearance. And there is the anti-Latina racism.”

“But what truly made the set piece work was Trump’s response, which Clinton could not have scripted better if she tried. Unlike the previous allegations, he did not deny them, but instead burst out — three times! — ‘Where did you find this?’ I have seen villains in Disney movies presented with damning evidence react this way, but I have never seen an actual human being do it, until now.”

Rick Klein: “Among the ways Donald Trump is breaking with conventional politics? He’s not even really pretending that he won the debate. He is insisting that he won, of course – but he’s also complaining about the moderator, the questions, and even the microphone he used at Hofstra. (As his opponent pointed out, winners don’t complain about the equipment.) And in the debate’s aftermath, he is also adding fuel to a two-decade-old feud with a former Miss Universe whom he attacked for gaining weight. This is the Trump that the Trump campaign had been trying to disappear – and the Trump that Hillary Clinton’s campaign insists is the only true Trump to exist.”

“That’s what’s behind Clinton’s masterful strategy from Monday night: She set traps for Trump to fall into – or, rather, she pressed a whole bunch of buttons knowing that something would set him off. Clinton got the result she wanted. Trump’s reaction, meanwhile, took would could have been a partial victory or a split decision and turned it into a solid loss. The Clinton camp got a debate win, and then a parting gift.”

First Read: “Trump’s ill-advised feud with Machado fits into a pattern we’ve noticed throughout the campaign: When Trump is in a bad period like this, he makes it worse for himself by refusing to back down. Particularly in the face of poor reviews (remember the Khan fight after his convention message was panned by pundits?), Trump has a tendency to spiral downward for a few days until he’s convinced to stop lashing out or punching down. Our question is: how long does bad stretch for Trump last?”

This is what Alicia Machado looked like when Trump took to publicly & privately humiliating her over her weight. She had just turned 20. pic.twitter.com/jfmMM3jGHW

— Garance Franke-Ruta (@thegarance) September 27, 2016

Greg Sargent:

Meanwhile, Dem pollster Greenberg says his dial sessions last night revealed that some of these constituencies — in particular, white millennials and unmarried women — responded to Clinton’s targeted appeals. He said that unmarried women responded positively to the sections laying out Clinton’s economic agenda, while millennials responded well to Clinton’s defense of Obama and to her discussion of racism as an enduring societal problem.

This gets at a broader story, which has been discussed by Ron Brownstein and Bill Scher. Clinton, following Obama, is increasingly aligning the Democratic Party with constituencies that welcome diversifying America — and as part of that process, she’s energizing its core voter groups by eschewing white grievance and by fully engaging the battle against Trump’s racism.

Donald Trump says that @KimKardashian "has gotten a bit large," because in for a penny in for a pound, right? https://t.co/77qDgKYWia

— Scott Bixby (@scottbix) September 28, 2016

Adam Gopnik captures the utter depravity of Donald Trump’s racism and sexism:

By 2011, Trump had simply succeeded in making this racist conspiracy theory so prevalent that Obama, who had released his birth certificate three years earlier, concluded that it was more efficient to end it for all time by asking Hawaiian officials for special permission to let him give out the “long form,” archival version than to let it go on…

Yet Trump continued last night his self-congratulations for compelling the President to do this, along with the grotesquely racist notion that it was “good for him” (i.e., for the President). It slowly dawned on the listener that this was all of a piece with the rest of Trump’s racial attitudes: he believes that, as a rich white man, he had a right to stop and frisk the President of the United States and demand that the uppity black man show him his papers. Stop-and-frisk isn’t just a form of policing for Trump; it’s a whole way of life…

By sexism, we mean something specific, not the business of appreciating beauty – if Trump wants to host beauty contests, let him – but the habit of conceiving of a woman as being a lesser species, one defined exclusively by appearance. His cruelty to Alicia Machado was unleavened by any apparent respect for her as a human being in any role other than as an envelope of flesh – an attitude he only doubled down on the following morning by complaining that she presented what he saw as an obvious problem as a reigning Miss Universe: she had gained “a massive amount of weight” (by Trump standards, that is).

Vox explains how Hillary Clinton’s mention of former Miss Universe Alicia Machado at the first presidential debate had been planned weeks in advance.

Cosmopolitan is out today with a long feature story on Machado headlined ‘Former Miss Universe Alicia Machado Won’t Be Defined by Donald Trump’s Fat-Shaming.’

The author of the story, Prachi Gupta, is the person who conducted a devastating interview with Ivanka Trump earlier in September. The Machado article includes photographs that were taken a week ago, making it clear that the groundwork for the debate moment was laid some time ago…

It turns out Machado also set up an interview with the Guardian’s Lucia Graves, apparently embargoed for post-debate release; the New York Times also has a fresh Machado story based on interviews.

A great anecdote from the New York Times:

There were early efforts to run a more standard form of general election debate-prep camp, led by Roger Ailes, the ousted Fox News chief, at Mr. Trump’s golf course in Bedminster, N.J. But Mr. Trump found it hard to focus during those meetings… That left Mr. Ailes, who at the time was deeply distracted by his removal from Fox and the news media reports surrounding it, discussing his own problems as well as recounting political war stories, according to two people present for the sessions.

"But Hawkins said the debate made her appreciate Clinton more… a feeling shared by most of the undecided voters" https://t.co/imWAUqSis3

— Greg Dworkin (@DemFromCT) September 27, 2016